UMass Senior Helps Discover New Galaxies

Astronomy News in The Boston Globe

March 30, 2016

Today, an article in the Boston Globe features a senior who attends the University of Massachusetts Amherst and how he helped discover some of the brightest galaxies in the universe.

Kevin Harrington was among the team who’s groundbreaking research was published in a prestigious European astronomy journal this month, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He made this discovery first by sifting through mountains of publicly available data and drawing his own conclusions and theories about said data. He was the lead author of a paper outlining the findings published in the above publication.

Harrington is 23 years old and discovered his love of astronomy in high school – he will be graduating UMass this spring and heading to start his doctoral work in September.

In response to this article, Clyfe Beckwith, Phillips Academy Physics Instructor gives “a shout-out for public institutions and to someone who is tenacious enough to sift through someone else’s (public) data.”